Things the game Needs (starting a big list)

[jasonwclark]

Things the game needs... (I'm going to start with 'needs' because 'wants' would take too long lol). This isn't ordered in terms of priority, just trying to set it down so I can remember what I'm thinking.

1. A way to sort through all the MP games being hosted, or to create player groups. Its only been up on early release for a day, but already I have an endless scroll going on.

2. A way to chat with players prior to launch. Before I commit to a game with somebody who I don't know I'd like a way to talk to them and see if its going to be a worthwhile match.

3. A way to open chat or public/private message in-game. Its Axis & Allies, and we need a way to talk to each other across the digital game table, especially to opponents.

4. A standard or promoted method to Handicap for player skill level.

Just having win/loss/drop rankings so you can track who's who isn't enough. We all love Larry, but player feedback is probably more important than designer feedback regarding the balance of the boxed game. We have been using various 'unofficial' methods for like 30 years now to try and make these games that we love work. There are several methods (the most popular was the descending tournament bid) but currently none are available here. This was announced a while ago so I had plenty of time to think about it. The only fix I was able to come up with after kicking around for several months on the issue, only works if players have a way to agree to certain play conditions beforehand. ie. if both teams agree to skip movement (only purchase/placement) in the first round of gameplay then you might have a game worth playing under otherwise vanilla conditions. Otherwise its 'good luck', because Axis are going to run the board.

5. Starting Income adjustment.

If that last issue seems daunting then there is a very simple solution to deal with the handicapping problem in A&A, and that is to allow players a way to edit starting income before the match begins. This is the oldest form of tournament bid going back to classic and it will work (if somewhat inelegant) because all balance issues on any A&A board can be addressed via adjustments to the starting cash for the side perceived to be at a disadvantage. It could also be used to make the solo game vs the AI more challenging for those who like that sort of stuff, but something along these lines is much more critically important in PvP.

6. Quick battles. We need a way to resolve the rolling/battling process much more quickly.

Ideally a little drop screen that can be used from the main map. See RISKII or TripleA for examples of how that can be set up. I don't dislike the current battle board design, but it is very time/click intensive and needs a fast battle alternative option from the main map to be the workhorse or games will take forever.

7. A way to track Moves during the combat and non-combat movement phases.

The little arrows aren't bad, but as far as I can tell there is no way to track what has moved where beyond trying to parse a bunch of arrow lines on the map. This makes it particularly hard to backtrack, change a move, or to see what happened during an opponent or teammate's move, let alone your own movement turn while you're still making it.

8. A better way to grab/split/select and move units within a territory.

Currently everything has to be clicked individually. This might work in the first round, but its going to be a nightmare during the endgame when the stacks get large, and multinationals start grouping together in the same territories or sea zones. What you need is a way to click for movement by territory tile or sea zone tile (not by individual unit types), this brings up a list of all units in the territory/sz and then offers a way to select the desired number of units by type and move only those to selected adjacent tile. Generally you want people to be mousing over and clicking the territory/sz tiles to issue movement orders, not using the individual units within those tiles, that should only be happening if its a very simple move with just a couple units involved not for pushing stacks.

9. A basic editor to add/remove units at any point in the game. Just like on the physical game board, players should have a way to make adjustments on the fly, to correct for mistakes or bugs that might otherwise hose a game after you've been playing it already (possibly for several hours committed.) Ideally any match that is edited would be flagged with an "Edited" sign or an asterisk* or whatever. If something like this existed it would eliminate the need for points 4 and 5 above, because the community could then implement most of the standard solutions we've been using since the boardgame first came out like 10 years ago.


Will add more to this list as it comes to me. Feel free to pile on.

Also, to the Devs... Thanks for taking this on. As with any existing franchise you're probably going to hear significant grumbling about the implementation or comparisons to other stuff past and present. I bought this game not because I really need another way to play Axis and Allies online, but because I wanted to support the continued growth of the franchise and I know this is basically the best chance we've got to see a digital platform that is supported and promoted by the publisher. So I'm here, and I know others will be too. But there is still work to do for sure.

best

Black Elk

[mantlefan]

Some filter that can prevent you from getting partnered with a Germany player who loses Germany twice in one game by attacking France with full force.

[Clarence Boddicker]

Originally posted by mantlefan:

Some filter that can prevent you from getting partnered with a Germany player who loses Germany twice in one game by attacking France with full force.

Lies, Germany would never lose to France

[nilsson_anders]

I will pretty much exclusively play solo games but I really like point 5 anyway as a way in single player game to make the AI harder to beat. I would love to see how many IP I could give the AI and still win as a challenge.

[TILK]

+111111111111110000000


7. A way to track Moves during the combat and non-combat movement phases.

The little arrows aren't bad, but as far as I can tell there is no way to track what has moved where beyond trying to parse a bunch of arrow lines on the map. This makes it particularly hard to backtrack, change a move, or to see what happened during an opponent or teammate's move, let alone your own movement turn while you're still making it.

So hard 1 vs 1 games are hard actually cause of it !

[Falaris]

Less clickwork is necessary.

When selecting casualties, you shouldn't have to zoom in to select which particular infantry is to be killed. Also, the 'battle into' videos are nice but having them play in the battle background would work just as well. In general, reducing the amount of clicking would be nice.

A 'continue' option at the battle end screen. Have it only in single player, by all means, but it'd be nice.

A defensive battle summary. After each enemy turn, a list of attacks and how they went would be good. I understand having it real time woudl collide with the pbemail option, but some sort of summary so you don't just go 'heeey... where did my fleet go??'

Thanks for fixing the online bit. Decided to give the game another chance. :)

[aardvarkpepper]

Originally posted by Falaris:

Less clickwork is necessary.

When selecting casualties, you shouldn't have to zoom in to select which particular infantry is to be killed.

There's times when selecting a particular infantry as a casualty is important. For example suppose you intend to attack a territory then retreat (this is a tactic used when you want to destroy enemy units but you don't want to commit your valuable artillery and tanks to actually capturing an enemy territory where they could themselves be destroyed.) Often you'll want to attack from multiple territories but retreat to a single *particular* territory.

I generally like less clicks too though.

[jasonwclark]

Unfortunately right now the battle view is full screen, and so you don't have the necessary map info for things like taking a specific casualty because of the retreat paths. With aircraft it does have a little fuel meter, but this can also be hard to read. (It should say 1 move, 2 moves etc, but right now it's just a display of the fuel tank 3/4 full 1/2 full which might be confusing some times. I think even if they are totally empy 4 moves, it still shows a tiny bit of fuel in the tank for example.) But anyhow for ground I think the way its set up is that all retreat paths are the same regardless of whether that unit survived or not, so I think a quick click would be fine and choosing specific infantry from the sidebar just seems like an extra step.

The main issue is that if you have to enter a battle window you lose perspective about where that unit came from on the map. It doesn't say in the battle screen where the unit's are coming from on the map so we'd have no way of knowing.

Not totally related but kind of, setting an OOL defense profile at launch is extremely significant to the gameplay right now in Axis and Allies online. Specifically the battle at Pearl Harbor.

If for example the Japanese player doesn't set their subs to dive, then the British can kill the Japanese sub in sz44. Likewise if the USA player doesn't set their subs to dive, then their sub in sz 53 will fight to the death. This is consequential for the Pacific opener, but as far as I can tell, how you select to deal with your subs is like a universal setting in the order of loss profile. At the very least, the OOL should be tuned to a specific territory/sz by turn and something that can be reset as needed. Learning how to play under the current default settings subs behave quite differently in the standard opener, which has taken some getting used to.

Basically the Order of Loss (defense profile) should be attached to the map tiles. It should be a feature of the map in the current round, rather than of the unit roster before the game has launched.

That's how people use it in PBEM "If this spot is attacked, this is the OOL for that spot." That's the only way it makes sense to me as a feature. The OOL should display on the map so that the attacker knows in advance, but shouldn't have to parse or do anything. I guess technically you could have a fog of war on it and keep the attacker in the dark until the battle is going on. But anyway a flagged note of the sort that you can leave right now would work to announce the Order of Loss if that's what works. The computer can still do all the autofiring and actual casualty selection in battle, so it doesn't disrupt the asynchronous thing or require the attacker to do casualty selection. If it was set up like that.

A map feature of that sort would basically allow defender to choose casualties again (or rather to choose in advance) while still being asynchronous. Something like that would better mirror what happens face to face.

[Richie Rich]

Number 8 has brought me here. I want quicker games and this is the number one sloooooooow down. When you have a 10 stack of something, it just isn't fun anymore.

[paulbelow]

I would like to see a key that lets you cycle through all of your units during the combat movement and non combat movement phases. Not an issue when playing, say, the Soviets, but with the UK or US you can have units all over the map and it is easy to miss some and forget to move them. Have it go from unit to unit of all those that have yet to move. Nice if it skipped units during combat movement that could not possibly attack anything.

[jasonwclark]

Yes that would have been very helpful in last night's game. It happened at least twice where players missed a key move, saw it immediately, but didn't have a way to edit/revert the game to previous phase.

Another thing that happened to me, after setting up a Defense Profile, is that I neglected to actually select it (which requires an additional step to toggle from the Default Profile to the Custom One.) I didn't realize until UK1 when the Japanese sub was killed. I thought I had set that sub to dive because I created the profile, but apparently I also needed to then select the new profile from a drop down list. Also when you create a new defense profile, there is a big button displayed at the bottom that says "reset to defaults" but no button that says "save profile" or "set this profile to default" and in order to close the window you have to hit the escape key. Which may lead the player to wonder whether they have actually set the profile or not.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/1y75v7wogj69uie/defense%20profile.png?dl=0

There are also two menu locations dealing with defense profiles, "Game Settings" and "Settings."
To select a defense profile you use Game Settings, but to create it you use Settings. Again feels kind of confusing. It should have a button to save/use profile from the screen above. One click to set.

I still think the whole defense profile thing should be a Map feature, rather than part of the player profile or game settings. You should be able to edit it from the map, with reference to a specific territory or sea zone and change it at any point during the current turn.

Another issue I had was with casualty selection in the Battle Screen, specifically with Battleships.
When hits for casualties are being assigned by the attacker, the undamaged battleship is listed in the bottom row. This led to a situation where I failed to select the first hit on the battleship, thinking that it would autoabsorb. But it doesn't, you have to manually select the battleship to assign the damage. For everything else the units are set up such that you can go from the top row down, to assign casualties based on unit cost (cheapest to most expensive.) The battleship's first hit should be first at the top of this list, because it is a free/no cost casualty hit.

In other words the undamaged battleship should be listed first in the top row (before subs), and moved to the bottom row once damaged has been assigned.

Lets say you end up in this situation. Pearl Harbor attack J1...
Japan: 1 sub, 2 fighters, 1 cruiser and 1 bomber vs
USA: 1 sub (dives to survive) so 1 fighter, 1 destroyer, 1 carrier.

Japan gets "luckier than they'd like" and wins with no casualties (both fighters surviving), and so now they must move their carrier from sz 50 to sz 53. Very undesirable outcome for Japan.

Now USA counter attacks...
USA: 1 sub, 1 destroyer, 2 fighters, 1 bomber, 1 battleship vs
Japan: 1 sub (stays to fight), 2 fighters, 1 cruiser, 1 carrier.

Here is the screen...

https://www.dropbox.com/s/akovqlluz1ccd83/battleship%20absorb%20first%20hit.png?dl=0

In this case both subs missed, but do you see where the undamaged US battleship is positioned on the battleboard? In this situation it may be very easy for the US player to accidentally assign their first casualty to the sub, forgetting that their battleship can absorb the hit for free, because of the way the units are being organized. If you do select the sub, rather than the undamaged battleship, you will see no warning reminding you that you have a free hit to absorb.

This is an easy misclick to make. It happened to me anyway with significant consequences for the game.

[[CoC] Campion]

Why cant 2 humans play on the same side against the computer?

[aardvarkpepper]

Originally posted by jasonwclark:

I still think the whole defense profile thing should be a Map feature, rather than part of the player profile or game settings. You should be able to edit it from the map, with reference to a specific territory or sea zone and change it at any point during the current turn.

Defensive casualties need to be determinable by player manual selection, or very exacting if-then conditions.

You're familiar with the Larry Harris tournament setup for 1942. German-held Ukraine starts with a bomber. Now imagine these different possibilities.

A. Russia player that has no idea what they're doing attacks Ukraine with an infantry and an artillery. In that case you do NOT want the bomber to be taken as a casualty.

B. Russia player attacks Ukraine with all possible units, West Russia with most of rest, reserves Archangel tank, Allied bid placement in Russia, signaling an attempted take-and-hold of Ukraine. Leaving aside the feasibility of this scenario, if the German player *does* think Ukraine's going to go right down to nothing, they DO want to kill the bomber *first* so defenders with higher values will last longer to inflict more casualties.

What I'm getting at is, casualty selection may only really need as simple an input as territory being attacked. But it could legitimately also require knowledge of an opponent's other combat moves, an opponent's first round of attack rolls, the current relative balance of forces, results of other battles in other territories, and even an opponent's purchased units.

I get the whole asynchronous play thing. It's a good idea in theory and most of the time in practice. But when defensive casualties can't be determined properly by defensive profiles, or a hypothetical map territory trigger, and if putting in a complex series of checks and triggers is impractical (both in terms of programming and in terms of ease of use for players), what I think is needed is a synchronous play option - at least to the extent that a defender can manually select casualties.

[jasonwclark]

Points well taken. It's hard to overstate just how complex this could become, if we are trying to set up contingencies for everything. I suppose one might imagine an attack power or tuv threshold that the computer could check during each phase of the combat round... But that does seem onerous in the pre-planning. It's kind of a weird situation because usually you move from a Live Play system that PBEM players then have to adapt, but here it's sort of the reverse, since clearly they are prioritizing a PBEM style of play over the usual "synchronous" style. Ideally in PBEM you'd have 2 email exchanges per round. But in practice you might have 3 or 4, when an Order of Loss is requested. For anyone unfamiliar in PBEM the attacker assigns defender casualties in good faith, and there is the expectation that edge cases may require an OOL follow up. This can happen in the middle of the battle, and the game is effectively paused until the defender responds.

Clearly Beamdog would prefer to avoid that step somehow, since it is a stall on progress, but what that means is a fairly significant attacker advantage and different gameplay, when compared to OOB conditions.

Honestly, I'm not sure what the best approach is here. Part of me thinks having a defense profile that only goes half-way, is worse than having no defense profile at all. Because at least in the latter situation you would know what's what at all times, and could build basic strategy accordingly. But that would necessarily mean a very different game than the one that comes in the box, and I don't know if others would just throw up their hands at that.

The point I was trying to make is that, with a defense profile in place, it is nevertheless really easy to imagine situations where you'd want 1 profile for 1 battle, and another for another battle, both in the same turn/round of gameplay. But as aardvark pointed out, really it's very hard to know in advance what you'd want to do, until you see what's happening in the specific battle.

This is what I think they might do...

Create a live synchronous version that uses the boxed rules, and requires defender to choose casualties. Uses the 1942.2 rules for carriers, and the standard method of handicapping in that game (descending tournament Bid.) Everything else by the book, exactly as printed. This might offer the Larry Harris tournament patch as an expansion, for a way to generate interest among veteran players.

Then create what we will just call Asynchronous Axis and Allies 1942 (Beamdog's 'official' rules, for a 'new' style of gameplay.) emphasis on New

This would free you from having to follow precedent, and allow you to just streamline it for the kind of game you want to create. The best analogy I can think of here would be Same-Time Risk, in the old RISKII game, which was clearly a different way of playing Risk, but which was still well received because you knew that you were playing something pretty different from the standard boardgame. Under these Asynchronous rules, you can just make hardline decisions about the order of loss, without upending the other mode of play, things like bombers always die last, fighters always die before carriers or whatever you want. Players would know beforehand when they play Asynchronous mode, that these are the deets, and plan their defense or purchasing strategies with that in mind.


ps. how do you create the Synchronous version of the boxed rules without totally redesigning what you've already made? I think this might be fairly straight forward actually. Allow the defender to flag a territory with an OOL request. When the attacker rolls their turn the battle pauses until the defender assigns casualties, then control reverts to the attacker and play resumes as normal. If the defender want's another OOL for the following combat round, they could flag it again. Sure this will slow down the play pace in some cases, but not every battle/round of combat will require an OOL, so its not something you'd need all the time. Most likely it would be very important in the first round of the game, and in the final round, or when a very significant battle is about to take place. In any case, people who are playing that way will understand why the stall is there and appreciate it. Or if they don't care for such things, don't want to wait for the other person, and would rather just speed along, then they can play the Asynchronous mode where they don't have to worry about it. You can make Asynchronous A&A the default play mode if you want to promote it, and call the other mode Traditional or Oldschool or whatever you think fits. Maybe you could call one "Fast Play", and the other "Long Play" (since that's pretty accurate in terms of how they'd work.) But if you had the latter, I think people would go easier on the former where departures from the box occur.

[Julius Borisov]

Originally posted by Campion:

Why cant 2 humans play on the same side against the computer?

It's possible. Please check out other threads where you asked the same question.

[Garvs1066]

Jumping in on this discussion a bit late but I have just spent 9 hours playing a PvP Sunday and the game was spoiled albeit slightly because of forgotten moves. Since, I have deleted part way through 8 games against the AI for the same reason. Both my opponent on Sunday and I cannot emphasise enough how important we think a cycle through unmoved units function is. I realise you could scan every province manually but this slows the game and when playing in real time rather than PBM this is an issue.